Posts tagged “GOP”

The Charlottesville protests went from “nah we’re not racists” to “yeah, we’re all Nazis, but not killers”, to “okay, we’re killers”. Trump is a symptom of a problem that was allowed to fester for too long. Conservatives have been allowed to slip into fascism and they don’t even know it.

But what did you expect when the left embraced neoliberalism? Where was the right wing to go but even further right?

Yes, I’m also blaming fake liberals for Charlottesville.

You are the Reagan Republicans now; where did You expect conservatives to go? How were they to define themselves against you after you conceded the economic argument to them and staked a claim into their ideological territory? You pushed the conversation to the right while still keeping social issues, never realizing how the two go hand in hand. The conversation moved to the right even as the social fabric in the nation moved to the left, in favor of diversity, representation, LGBT rights, and so on.

But when the right went fascist, it wasn’t just their economic principles that went right, it was everything. The echo chamber that gave them a home (Fox News, Breitbart, Stormfront) also told them that the social movements were evil, that their heritage was under attack, that Obama was a Muslim who came to take their guns.

What did you think would happens when that radicalized right found themselves in the middle of a social order that they didn’t recognize as their own? You got Charlottesville.

That’s not to say that the left must ease up on social change – hell no! We must double down. We must get angrier, more hostile towards hate speech, bigotry, racism, and unprincipled Islamophobia (that’s the singling out of one religion as opposed to criticism of all religions).

But if we are to stop conservatives from falling off the edge, then the economic message must also shift left. The fascists will never move; they’ve chosen their side. The shift will speak to those who feel the Democrats (and in their minds, by extension the left) doesn’t care about their economic needs). The right stole populism from us; we must take it back. We must abandon these phony, corporate Democrats, let them go join the Republicans – hell, maybe as GOP they can turn conservatism around instead of dragging progressives to the right.

Time to beat these fascists back. Conservatives, now you get to decide if you’re one of them…or an American.